Working with Snapchat Geofilters

With Snapchat’s IPO coming up, we’re seeing lots of editorial questioning how a company that lost $515million last year can be worth a staggering $25billion. With this comes the usual questions about where and how they make money…

Snapchat has a robust and sophisticated ad offering through its ‘Discover Platform.’ Since launching in 2015 it has captured the attention of media owners and reaches the consumers in a “native” way which isn’t irritating or pushy, it’s actually quite cool.

The other side of Snapchat monetisation, which we’re big fans of here at Spinnaker HQ, is their branded GeoFilters. Using precise targeting you can buy 2 types of placements, a “filter” or a “lens” which are triggered when Snapchat users enter a certain designated area. Filters display branded images or animations e.g. fries pouring over the user’s head when they are near or in a McDonalds. Whilst lenses take this experience further, allowing the user to interact with the experience e.g. when a user opens their mouth an animation is triggered.

Both options give brands the opportunity to interact with Snapchat users at a certain time and in a certain place in a really immersive and exciting way, very different to most other social networks.

Perfect for events, launches and special occasions these GeoFilters are surprisingly easy to set up, and inexpensive to do so.

Our high impact work with Sony has already seen us develop filters and lenses on a national level that taps right into our target audience, cinemagoers, by targeting them in the ticket halls of the cinemas themselves.

Our lens for Passengers has shooting stars and a spaceship shooting past when a user opens their mouth. This placement launched on day of release in over 250 cinemas in the UK and thr results were out of this world! Take a look at the experience here.

All singing all dancing filters aren’t always necessary. The simpler execution can be just as effective for the right scenario. For T2 Trainspotting we ran a static filter execution using the films key art. Users were served it nationally at cinemas, but also all over Edinburgh in the lead up to the city’s World Premiere of the film. This contributed to local buzz and saw proud fans sharing their excitement.

Streetcat Bob had an even more localised approach – allowing Londoners in the local vicinity of Royal Premiere to put “Bob” on their shoulder and share the action with their followers not lucky enough to be there.

If you’ve got an event coming up that could use some localised promotion please get in touch and look out for more SnapChat GeoFilter activity coming out of Spinnaker HQ very soon.